The margin moved. Somebody should be able to say why.
Every services firm knows the feeling. A project was sold at a healthy margin and is now sitting at a worse one. Everyone has a theory. The account lead thinks the scope grew, delivery thinks the rates were always thin, finance thinks someone senior has been on it too long. All three can be partly right, and nobody can settle it.
A single number moved, and it has at least five reasons to.
Margin is a compound. A project can lose two points because the rate charged came down in negotiation, another three because the work is taking more days than planned, another two because the people delivering it are more senior than the ones priced, another one because someone's cost stepped up mid-engagement, and gain one back because scope was added and paid for. The total is a single figure and the causes point in different directions.
Most systems show the before and the after. That is enough to start the argument and not enough to end it, so the conversation runs on recollection and seniority. The estimate that produced the original number never learns anything, because nobody could say which part of it was wrong.
The case the deal was won on is kept, and it is what delivery is measured against.
When a deal is won it is promoted into a project in one step, and the priced, staffed model it was won on is captured as the sold baseline at that moment. That capture is part of the promotion rather than an optional extra. So the comparison starts from the commitment the firm actually made, with the roles, the days, the rates and the phase modes it was made on — rather than from a picture reassembled later in good faith, when the sale happened in another system and the assumptions behind the price were never written down in one place.
Where a project is created directly rather than promoted from a won deal, there is no sold case to compare against, and the surface says so rather than inventing a starting point. Everything else still works from whatever date you choose.
On the last project that came in under margin, did you ever establish why?
If the answer was a meeting rather than a number, that is the gap. The projects page covers the plan, the phases and the extensions that sit underneath this, and the approach page sets out how the case a deal was won on carries through to delivery. The demo runs on a firm where the movement is already decomposed. It is free and ready to use.